


What's Left

by letsstartagain



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Gen, endgame spoilers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-29
Updated: 2019-04-29
Packaged: 2020-02-09 14:09:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18639676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/letsstartagain/pseuds/letsstartagain
Summary: Endgame spoilers. Canon-compliant.Those who are left figure out how to move on.Chapter 1: Bruce





	What's Left

He’s been losing hours at the end of the old pier, the sunlight warm on his back.

* * *

When he’d learned Tony had left his parents’ old summer home to him, he’d refused reflexively, horrified.

“I’ve got my own place and everything,” he’d protested. He’d thought of his duplex in Cincinnati, cold and grey, “Really, I can take care of myself. You should keep it.”

Pepper had looked at him then, eyes red and tired.

“Tony--” she’d hesitated, voice hoarse, “--he never took us up there,” a faint smile, “Didn’t want to be anywhere near the place. You’d really be doing us a favor.”

“Pepper, I--”

“--Our estate agent said it could really use some work,” Pepper had continued, “It’s one of those old southern houses someone decided to build twenty feet away from some huge mosquito-infested lake. The foundation’s gone, I think.”

A thick silence had followed, ruthlessly smothering the late afternoon sun caught by the dust motes drifting aimlessly through the living room.

“I don’t--” Bruce had begun, mouth dry, “I don’t think that’s something I know how to fix.”

Through the thick film of his tears, he’d found Pepper’s hand in his, her wavering voice shot through with steel.

“Me neither.”

* * *

He took the next flight down to Tallahassee, an address scribbled on paper in the back pocket of his jeans. He braced himself, smiling mechanically at the small crowd that inevitably gathered around him at the single luggage carousel in the one-terminal airport, but their response was surprisingly muted. Oversized duffel slung over a shoulder, he reminded himself then that this was a world intimately re-acquainted with the senseless fortune of loss.

It took him several hours to find the house, swallowed as it was by the tangle of oak spilling over from the bordering nature reserve. Dubiously, he eyed the sagging colonnades, the moldy steps to the veranda that gave way the moment he gave them a half-hearted nudge. After a few increasingly skeptical laps around the house, he tossed his duffel into the bed of his rental truck and wandered down the steep slope behind the house towards the quiet murmurations of the lake Pepper had told him about.

After a moment’s struggle, he emerged from the thick tangle of brush to a heavily-shaded shore, rounded pebbles mingled with coarse grit cool beneath his feet. A mangled pier extended some twenty feet into the water, creaking quietly in the breeze.

He sat where he was, damp seeping into his pants, and watched the sun glint off the water in fractured angles.

_It’s good to meet you, Doctor Banner._

Tears welled again, and he hugged his knees to his chest.

He remembered another day, another stretch of blue glittering under the sun, falling away as they rose into the sky.

Hazily, he could just make out the far, tree-lined shore, which cut a jagged line through the horizon.

_We’re gonna be okay. Right? I swear on my life I will get you out of this._

“Stop lying to me,” he whispered.

* * *

He pieced the pier back together first, focusing on something small, something manageable, rather than the tangled ruin he’d left behind. He slept out on the shore through the wet summer, sheltered beneath the thick oak canopy that hid the multitude of stars from view.

He called Steve sometimes, and Pepper too, but less often.

It took him just a day to tear down the old house, not that it’d needed much convincing. One good, calculated shove, and it fell almost silently, dust and mold rising from the ruins. It took him several months to haul away the detritus in the rental truck he’d never bothered to return. The old folks at the dump waved him through their rusty chain-link fence several times a day every time he rattled up with another load of mouldering history. Sometimes, on especially punishing days, he’d have a beer with them out on their porch in the stifling heat. They never asked, and he never offered, rumbling away down the dirt road with a quiet thanks before the comfortable silence could morph into something else.

* * *

He sits out on the pier now, the wood warm and rough beneath his hands, the water cool and still around his ankles. The clearing where the house used to be is empty now, and the forest creeps ever closer each day, threatening to swallow, to forget.

There is a small box in his truck of things he’d picked from the rubble, things that had already been forgotten. A few faded pictures bleached white with age. A tattered flannel blanket. A moldy book or two.

Tony would want them burned, he knows. Or at least he’d say he did. Quietly, in the dead of night, though, he’d creep down and pick through the memories from his childhood, choosing some to relive, some to discard for good.

The sun hangs in the sky, placid, waiting.

* * *

Clint appears one afternoon sometime before or after Christmas, and Laura and the kids are with him. Bruce watches in quiet bewilderment as they pile out of another, larger truck and ogle the large hole in the ground where the Stark summer home had been.

“Bruce,” Clint says with a casual wave, surveying the clearing with what appears to be satisfaction.

“Hi,” Bruce replies dumbly, “How--what are you doing here?”

“Road trip,” Clint replies, watching warily as his kids edge off into the brush, “Heard you were in the area.”

“A road trip to _Tallahassee?”_

Clint shrugs, shredding a blade of grass with meticulous precision.

“Just passing through,” he says.

Bruce turns to Laura, who smiles a little sadly and gently takes Clint’s hand, quieting his restlessness.

_I tried. I really tried to bring her back._

“Well, um,” Bruce says, “Welcome.”

Clint smirks at him--or tries to. Grief has worn away his edges.

“Listen, uh,” Bruce continues, uncertain, “I obviously know nothing about building anything that won’t cause a global catastrophe, but...” He hesitates. “If you had some time on your hands, maybe you could, I don’t know, give me a few pointers.”

Clint squints up at him.

“How many PhDs you have?”

“Not enough, apparently.”

Clint smiles crookedly.

“What do you think?” he says to Laura, whose grief has sharpened her love, “Doctor Banner could use a little help.”

Laura looks at them both and sees all that they share.

“They would have loved it,” she says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Italicized dialogue lifted from _The Avengers_ and _Avengers: Endgame._


End file.
